Blog
On a bright beautiful Sunday afternoon, where do you find the Flux Metalheads? Inside the corrugated confines of American Steel, obviously. Today was the first day of prototyping in the metal shop, and Fluxers old and new spent the day trying to figure out how exactly one builds a giant seaweed monster out of schedule [...]
FLUX just finished our first installation day at the Minneapolis Convention Center for Colony, the collaborative piece we are co-creating with the 5,000 participants at next week’s American Association of Museums (AAM) Annual Meeting. The piece is composed of a plywood grid that will act as a base for a cardboard sculpture that will evolve [...]
The Zoa model is getting tested and refined. Rebecca has been busy building and tweaking a minituature 1/24th scale model, to give us a physical object to look at and test ideas. It lets us make fine adjustments to make the structure easier to build, structurally sound, and more beautiful to look at. The [...]
Welcome new FLUX artist (and blogger) Kali! Her observations and excitement remind us why we do this crazy BIG art thing! Kali, take it from here….. “Cover!” shouts Cheryl. I grab my face mask and hover over her shoulder to watch the sparks fly. The fabulous Zoa project is coming together as the Flux artists are [...]
Zoa is the latest project by the FLUX Fondation. It has been made possible by a project grant from Burning Man, LLC. Zoa’s Conceptual Framework: Fertility can be understood as the space and propensity for growth. The most unlikely of things must conspire to create something unexpected. A deceptively small, almost unknowable thing can take [...]
FLUX is celebrating the start of a new collaboration! Today we begin TweetHausOAK a collaboration with Park Day School in Oakland. TweetHaus is the fifth project for FLUX. It is a public art + ecology project focused on citizen science and interactive learning. It fosters community through the design, construction and installation of bird habitats [...]
A maker workshop for building flame effects NEXT WORKSHOP: TBD Cost: $100 – workshop only $325 – workshop+poofer ($250 in materials) What you’ll do: This one-day class will introduce you to the basics of flame effects and give you the hands-on experience building your first poofer. The class will feature a broad overview of flame [...]
While we love building really Big Art that inspires and wows people, we started thinking about how nice it would be to have a piece that’s small and fun. Our criteria was to make something with a simple yet exciting interactive flame effect, something that’s mobile — preferably on wheels, and something that’s small enough to [...]
As always, BRAF’s annual ARTumnal Gathering was an amazing event filled with spectacular art and performance. Every year, BRAF transforms the marble halls and stairways of San Francisco’s Bentley Reserve into a creative wonderland. FLUX has had the honor of being part of this event for the past two years — last year as the [...]
Our winter snowflake skill-building class just ended, and it was a huge success. During four evening classes, each of our students made a number of snowflakes out of sheet metal. Starting on the first day with aluminum, we went though the process of designing a project with an eye to what steps would be needed to complete it and [...]
It started one night in the shop when we were brainstorming ideas about how to raise the funds we need to keep our organization running. We decided to have a fundraiser (on December 8th at American Steel) and hold a silent auction. I tossed out the crazy idea of making a sculpture that we could [...]
Flux exhibited BrollyFlock! in September at the Nocturnal Festival in San Bernadino, California, and got yet another amazing response to this interactive piece. For two days and nights, the sculpture awed those in it’s presence. The piece utilizes spectacle to great effect, disarming individuals and creating a unique moment for each person who experiences it. [...]
We’re about to take our newest creation, BrollyFlock out to play again, this time in Southern California at Nocturnal on September 23rd & 24th, an event in San Bernadino put on by Insomiac. We’ve been busy in the shop tweaking her flame effects, cleaning up the brollies, fixing LEDs and ironing out some of the [...]
It is a mad dash to the finish line at Bay 3 in American Steel. Last night, the shop was beautiful chaos and flurries of activity from the ground to the ceiling as people built packing crates, climbed up the legs to start the first set of brolly arms and plugged in 24 brollies that [...]
Every Monday, the schedule for the week is sent out. Thursday, May 5 there was going to be a welding class – I wasn’t going to miss it for the world. Rebecca gathered the “class” of 5 or 6 of us around and started off with a safety talk, followed by a brief explanation of [...]
On the way home from our first shop day, Arin and I were excitedly talking about all that we’d done. “Do you want to go next weekend?” I anxiously asked. “SURE!” she replied. But then Catie said, “Great, but just so you know I can’t make it next Saturday.” Shoot! What would we do without [...]
Wow. Wow. Wow. We just got back from a whilrwind trip to NYC where we had the opportunity to share the work for the Flux Foundation with the TED community…and beyond…at the TED 2010: Full Spectrum Auditions. What an inspiring experience. We shared the stage with some truly incredible people — musicians, astrophysicists, artists, innovators, [...]
We just got these brand new, super sexy renderings from one of our favorite 3D artists, Ed Henry, down in LA. We are thrilled to be able to share them with you. We’re in full force at the shop at American Steel. If you’ve got the hankering for some metal working and flame effect building, [...]
As an off-and-on Black Rock City resident and big fan of The Crucible since 2003, I have seen a fair bit of “big art” – usually gigantic metal sculptures + fire, lights, and other awesomeness. I had heard of “The Flaming Lotus Girls” (how could you not?) and longingly marveled at the idea of women designing and [...]
Wow. We are so impressed with these amazing images. Much work went in to creating these, from the hand-made model to these computer generated models. Thanks to Nicole, Helix, Rbca, PK & Jess for working on the model. And especially to Nicole, who created these incredible models. We can’t wait to show them at TED! [...]
Two weeks ago, in a mad creative whirlwind, we put our heads together and created a one minute video that we submitted to TED as our audition for the TED2012: Full Spectrum conference. Today, we got the news that we are in! FLUX is going to TED! On May 24th, we will travel to NYC [...]
The Brollyflock project is now fully set in motion, and things are happening. This last weekend was filled with lots of planning, measuring, cutting, clamping, testing, (measuring and cutting again), welding, sawing, sewing, plumbing, and setting things on fire. With lots of opportunities for the newer people on the team to learn new things from [...]
Us Fluxers are nearly swimming in umbrellas! This past week we made some terrific additions to the shop infrastructure, got some fine folks started working with metal and made lots of progress on the silly fun that is Brollyflock. The Brolly teams have prototyped the fabric and metal umbrellas, and, thanks to Don & Poe, our electromagical specialists, the [...]
The last month has been busy for us Fluxers. We spent the cold, rainy winter months fixing up the Fishbug for a trip to Southern California in late March. We took it out to play at Beyond Wonderland with a bunch of our friends, including the Flaming Lotus Girls who brought Mutopia, Interpretive Arson with [...]